As we write, the world scrambles to solve the mystery of, and assign blame for, the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Tempers run high. So does speculation about culprits and motives.

Late last week, President Barack Obama said the U.S. believes the jetliner was hit by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Others speculate that the strike could have been a Ukrainian military mistake or a Russian-assisted rebel attack.

We could fill this page with rampaging theories about who fired that missile and why. Evidence at the crash site is already feared to be irretrievably tainted. Certainty won’t likely come soon.

What’s clear: An intramural spat, stoked by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a former Soviet Union satellite, has gyrated out of control. It has yielded terrible collateral damage for innocents not just in Ukraine, but around the world for friends and families of nearly 300 people killed in the crash.

But how and why this happened may be less important than what happens now.

This is a moment of opportunity for Putin, the Great Enabler of the Ukrainian conflict: He supplies arms to rebels, funds and trains them. He amasses troops on Ukraine’s borders. Putin alone can recall his troops, yank his support and let Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders deal with its citizens’ aspirations. “This war can be ended,” the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, told the Security Council. “Russia can end this war and Russia must end this war.”

Just last week, pro-Russian rebels were girding for a showdown against Ukrainian government troops in one stronghold. The rebels had been forced to retreat by a Ukrainian onslaught after a cease-fire collapsed. Rebels appealed for help from Moscow, but apparently received none.

That recusal was Putin’s choice. Some speculated that the Russian president realized the mounting economic damage of Western sanctions against his country. That he had calculated that his springtime gain in grabbing Crimea would not be followed by a similarly swift and easy conquest of eastern Ukraine. He may have feared inviting more sanctions. Whatever the reason, he apparently took at least a modest step back.

Last week, Washington did impose a new round of economic sanctions on Moscow because, as Obama said, “there has been some improved language coming from the Kremlin, but what we have not seen is … different actions that would give us confidence” that Russia would help restore the peace, not seed more violence. Yet Europe, including Putin’s major trading partners, failed to strongly follow suit. There’s too much business at stake, you see.

But it should be clear to European leaders that the Kremlin, in seizing Crimea and fueling conflict in Ukraine, poses the most serious threat to European security since the Cold War. Putin can match word with deed to tamp down the violence in Ukraine. If he fails to seize this moment, he should expect more draconian sanctions from the U.S. and — fingers crossed — its European allies.

Ukraine may have seemed remote for many Americans. It is less remote today. This is a seething moment in an increasingly threatening conflict. Putin can reduce tensions. Or not. A smoldering jet hull in a wheat field testifies to how quickly the consequences of his choices can spill across international borders.

— Chicago Tribune

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